The BAD AST Project - Faze II

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I had a four day weekend and, with Mels help we got a few things done.
Mel pulled his trailer out Friday morning and "camped" in my backyard again. Sure does save him alot on petrol.
Friday morning Mel and I ran into Flint and exchanged the empty Oxy bottle for my torches for a full one, picked up a drawer slide at Home Depot and stopped at Harbor Frieght for $9.99 4 1/2" grinders and rust removal discs.
We built a grinding station out of a free sink base cabinet I had put on casters a few weeks ago.
Added a drawer, tool holders, a shelf and an electrical outlet.


After using it all weekend I am going to add a another outlet so we can have more than two grinders plugged in at a time. This thing is very handy and it is nice to be able to roll it outside for heavy grinding!
Saturday I did the car show in Durand and we had a few friends over for a cookout that afternoon and evening. While we had warm bodies available we set the 49 ford pickup cab on the frame so the new owner can have it hauled home on a rollback.

Sunday Mel and I finally got back to work on the Astro. I have decided to go with a shorter shock in the front so we cut down the shock towers to fit.

Mel did a lot of that while I was working on Steering rack brackets.


Sunday night we came up with a fixture design to hold the rack at the right height and angle so we could position it crosscar and build our brackets off the rack.

Pretty simple really. A piece of 1/4" plate and some angles with tabs tacked on so we could hose clamp the rack in place.


Mel built most of the fixture monday morning while I was changing the wax ring on my daughters main bathroom toilet.... Good Times...
After the fixture was built and we had the rack where it needed to be the bracket build went pretty smooth.
Here we are fitting some of the pieces together.


Did some redesigning on the fly and had everything ready to tack at lunchtime.
Once they were tacked we pulled them off and I finish welded them while Mel designed and built some gussets for the underside to support the rack.


I welded them up and bolted them on for a look-see...

That was my weekend.
Thanks for looking
Mark